Urban Company tackles workplace bias with new campaign

The campaign film created by Talented Agency challenges the traditional perception of a workplace and highlights respect for blue-collar workers.

Urban Company has been on a mission to bridge the respect gap between India’s white and blue-collar workers over the past year. After Chhota Kaam, and Chhoti Soch, its third film in the series speaks about this subtle yet insidious prejudice, brought to life in a conversation between a father and daughter.

Around this time each year, LinkedIn is flooded with chatter about leadership in workplaces- good managers, bad managers, toxic managers, handing-out-peanuts-in-the-name-of-increment managers. However, the very same employees who engage in discourse around leadership styles, work-life balance and mental health, often don’t make the best employers, at home.

Kartik Ahuja, senior brand manager at Urban Company says, “Over the last 10 years, Urban Company has been instrumental in reshaping India’s access to blue-collared services. We have two constituents, our customers and our partners, and in order to create a mutually beneficial platform, a conversation around the dignity of labour isn’t just a communication platform, but a business necessity that ensures consistent year-on-year earnings growth for our partners, safety nets in the form of insurance and medical cover. Over 57,000 Urban Company Professionals have benefitted from skill training programs and accreditations, climbing the ladder to upward social mobility. With this work, our intent is to nudge society to see our partners the way we see them – as professionals.”

Through hours of interviewing UC Professionals, the creative team at Talented derived insights about the various ways in which the respect gap between blue and white-collar workers has widened. This bank of biases highlighted that the limited ‘glass-cabin’ view of workplaces excludes the very environment that millions of UC professionals work in every day - our homes. Thus the mutual respect, irrespective of the stature or nature of work, that forms the bedrock of dignity, doesn’t permeate these glass borders.

Aakash Desai, strategy at Talented adds, “We all wax eloquent about mental health at the workplace and what we expect from our managers within the contours of Corporate India. We have an expansive vocabulary to talk about what makes a “toxic” workplace; and yet we often forget that our homes are the workplaces for UC Professionals and other support staff – that we are their managers. How do our actions at home weigh against our ideas of creating a conducive environment for someone to do their life's best work? In our third film in the series, we attempt to bridge the respect gap between white and blue-collar workers, to reflect UC customers being allies to UC Pros.”

Kopal Naithani, founder and director at Superfly, says, “The film is a slice-of-life, everyday conversation between a father and a daughter – a casual chat that takes an unexpected turn and pushes the father to counter an unspoken prejudice. Our biases against blue-collar workers are seldom verbalised – it is complex, rooted in class-based 'othering' and passed down generations. Therefore the only way to break these intergenerational cycles of bias, is to pause, recognise and question them.”